Kurds, Secure in North Iraq, Are Cool to a U.S. Offensive

By JOHN F. BURNS

Published: July 8, 2002

ERBIL, Iraq, July 6 — As the United States considers ways of accomplishing President Bush's call for an end to Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq, Washington's goal of a "regime change" in Baghdad is running into strong reservations from Iraqi Kurdish leaders who would be crucial allies in any military campaign.

These leaders, interviewed in their strongholds in northern Iraq in the last week, say flatly that they would be reluctant to join American military operations that put Kurds at risk of an onslaught by Iraqi troops of the kind they suffered after the Persian Gulf war in 1991. A Kurdish uprising then that was encouraged by the first President Bush was brutally suppressed by Mr. Hussein, and American forces failed to intervene as thousands of Kurds were killed.

No group has suffered more from Mr. Hussein's 23-year-old rule than the Kurds, who lost tens of thousands of lives to Iraqi offensives in the 1980's and 90's. The most brutal attacks, cited by the present President Bush recently as part of the justification for toppling the Iraqi ruler, involved Iraqi use of poison gas at Halabja and dozens of other towns and villages in the northern Kurdish districts during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war that ended in 1988.

Still, no Iraqis have benefited more from Western support in the last decade than the Kurds. Protected by a "safe haven" declared by the United Nations and a "no-flight zone" patrolled by American and British warplanes, the Kurds, with barely 40,000 troops and only light weapons, have built a 17,000-square-mile mini-state that arcs across a 500-mile stretch of Iraqi territory bordering Syria, Turkey and Iran.

The threat of Western airstrikes has kept Iraqi armored battalions immobilized to the south, often within artillery range of Kurdish strongholds like Erbil, a sprawling city of 750,000 people 250 miles north of Baghdad. In this "liberated area" of soaring mountains, fertile foothills and semi-desert, the Kurds have built a society with freedoms denied to the rest of Iraq's population.

The Kurdish-controlled area has opposition parties and newspapers, satellite television and international telephone calls, and an absence of the repressive apparatus that has prompted international human rights organizations to brand Mr. Hussein's Iraq a terror state.

The drawback is that all this exists outside international law, and could be made permanent only by a new government in Baghdad that embraced freedoms for all of Iraq.

But while an American-led military campaign to topple Mr. Hussein holds out the possibility of making their freedoms more secure, the Kurdish leaders, backed by almost every Kurd who discussed the issue, said Washington would be asking them to put all they have gained from their decade of autonomy at risk of a fresh Iraqi offensive.

"We are not ready to take any risks, and if we are not sure of the outcome of any step, then we are not ready to take that step, because we are not sure of improving our circumstances," Massoud Barzani, leader of one of the two main Kurdish political groups, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said at his mountaintop headquarters outside Salahuddin, north of Erbil.

He added, alluding to the centuries of oppression Kurds suffered from Turks, Arabs and Persians, "This is a golden era for Iraqi Kurds."

Their concerns are so deep that the Kurds have set aside political differences among themselves to speak with a common voice on the possibility of American action against Mr. Hussein. After a history of internecine strife, including a brief civil war in 1996, Mr. Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan have divided the northern territory into two separate areas, each with its own government and army.

But at their respective headquarter cities, Erbil and Sulaimaniya, the reluctance of the Kurds to support American moves against Mr. Hussein is expressed in virtually identical terms. Leaders in both cities said officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency visited the Kurdish territory this year to discuss American options, and had also met with Kurds in Washington and Europe.

At one meeting in Europe this spring, Kurdish officials in Sulaimaniya said, Mr. Barzani and Mr. Talabani, bitter rivals for years, sat down together to meet with American officials. Their main message, the Kurdish officials said, was that Washington should not expect Kurds to subordinate their own safety to American priorities. "Nobody has suffered more from Saddam than the Kurds," one senior official said. "We told the Americans, `This time, the Kurds will put their own interests first, and last.' "

Although the Kurds' fear of again being abandoned by the United States seemed real, the greater fear seemed to be of Mr. Hussein. An official in Erbil acknowledged that the Kurdish leaders, in publicly discouraging American military action, were signaling to the Iraqi leader that the Americans, not the Kurds, were his adversaries. "Saddam is our shadow," the official said. "He's always there, right behind us, and we don't want him to think that we're drawing the Americans in to overthrow him."